𝔸𝕟𝕒𝕥𝕙𝕖𝕞𝕒. [WRITING PROMPTS]

#1

Rest For The Wicked

I didn't mean to kill him.

I swear.

It just kind of...happened.

Now I stand, staring down at the old geezer as he lays splayed in a blossoming pool of his own blood. Crumpled like an ancient piece of paper wrapped in loose silk robes, the crown of his skull feathery with thinning white hair. Face against the terracotta linoleum, rivulets of deep crimson trickling from his nostrils. His glacial blue eyes are filmed over, deeply bloodshot and empty. And I stand above him, holding the knife in my hand, feeling his blood stream between my fingers in tacky ribbons.

Outside, a bird calls, and a lawnmower roars to life. This somehow shocks me from my stupor, and I feel the knife slip from my hand and hit the tiles, clattering loudly. Not a soul moves, the massive, spacious living room preserved in a stuffy silence. It smells like lavender soap and pennies. Bars of buttery yellow light stream in from the slanted ceilings, spooling over the lush shag rugs and lumpy leather upholstery. Upon the windowsill, a sleek turtle-shell cat watches me, licking her miniature paw slowly.

"Oh shit," I say allowed. "Mother-effer."

Okay, okay. I know what you're thinking.

You don't believe me.

Well, listen me out, wont'cha? I didn't come to work today planning out a way to take a steak knife to Harold Lee Warburg's cushy, silk-clad stomach. In fact, I barely had any malicious feelings towards the guy - sure, he was a ninety-something douche-bag with money practically coming out of his bushy ears, but I didn't wanna - hell, I didn't wanna kill the guy.

It's not my fault he snapped and went all psycho on me.

I used to think Warburg wasn't senile. Now, standing above his rumpled, still-warm corpse with his blood on my sneakers, I'm not so sure. Me, his G-damned waiter, slicing ribs for the guys effing dinner, and I turn to find him in his fluffy slippers and bathrobe coming at me like something out of Night Of The Living Dead. Thick strings of saliva hanging off his curled lips, glassy eyes askew as his knobby hands clawed at my chest. He was breathing like an effing bull - snarling words I couldn't understand.

So I stabbed him.

Yeah, yeah, so sue me.

I was trying to protect myself from getting G-damned killed, 'ight? Get off my ass.

Now, looking around at the dude's massive, empty mansion, I don't know what to do.

Here I am, blood-stained. There he is, dead at my feet. A blackish pool of congealing blood eating up at the marble flooring. 

"Mother-effer," I repeat, with no response. Not even the cat acknowledges me.

To be fair, though maybe I'm telling myself this to make me feel better, the geezer was sick already. Older than my grandma's Antiques Roadshow collection and sick enough to need me, some wacked-up twenty-year-old down on his effing luck, to be around to peel the tops off his apple sauces. The man was as good as dead anyway. He could've bought out a whole G-damned pharmacy with the amount of pills I fed the guy each day. 

Yeah. He was as good as dead.

Or so I tell myself.

Well, what am I supposed to do now? Leave him to rot, hit the freeway and don't look back? Nah, can't leave Jackson like that. Yet what else am I supposed to do? Me, a poor-ass Latino kid, turning myself into the Feds for killing the richest white guy around? Hells no. As if anybody would believe me if I told them the geezer went all Psycho Killer on me and I was just defending myself.